Top 10 festival beers – all are available in canned form.
Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian

Time to air your sleeping bag, shake the mud from last year’s wellies and tally up your bent tent pegs – whether you’re heading to BoomTown or Bestival this summer, festival season is upon us.

Gone are the days when festival beer meant shelling out a tenner for a cardboard cup of weak lager. Thanks to craft breweries’ enthusiastic shift towards producing health-and-safety-friendly cans, when the lights go down on the main stage, you can schlep back to a tent that is better stocked than the bar.

The rules about the amount you can bring differ from festival to festival, although glass is universally banned. Some – such as Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds – allow you to bring enough booze “for personal consumption”, which is easy to exaggerate if you enter as a group with a few wheelbarrows. Others set a limit: Secret Garden Party, for example, permits just eight cans a person. Some festivals let you carry beer around with you – generally those where camping is scattered around the stages (eg Glastonbury). Where there is demarcation between campsites and the arena – such as V Festival – personal booze is usually confined to the former.

Remember to pack cool bags, can coolers or sleeves, although some festivals – including Glastonbury – have started selling ice on site. Bear in mind that the hotter the festival, the weaker the beer you’ll want to drink – you are unlikely to enjoy an imperial porter when you wake up parched in a sticky tent. Lisa Harlow, the co-founder of Dea Latis, a network for female beer fans, advises that lighter, golden beers suit a summer festival vibe. Here are the beers our experts will be packing.

Beavertown’s session pale ale is gentle (4.3%) without being boring – the perfect festival beer. It packs plenty of big-name American hops (simcoe, amarillo, mosaic) which ordinarily dominate IPAs with juicy sweetness. Here, Beavertown tones them down by dry-hopping (adding handfuls of hops late in the boil), resulting in a bitter, refreshing beer.

Bibble means “to drink regularly” in Somerset, and fittingly resembles the noise you might make after one too many all-nighters in a ravetastic field such as Glastonbury’s Shangri-La. Recover with this light, perky, fruity pale ale (4.2%); it also tastes like oranges, so you can fool yourself into thinking you’re loading up with vitamin C.

Sour and salty, and packed with tart gooseberry and apple, this is a beer to cut through the campfire smog and wake up your palate. Beer writer Jessica Boak, of the beer blog Boak and Bailey, says this gose-style beer is at its best cold, “but if you can handle festival-temperature Tango, less-than-chilled Salty Kiss shouldn’t trouble you”. Brewed with sea salt, this beer could help with your hangover by replacing all the minerals you lost headbanging to Megadeth.

For even the most sanctimonious beer connoisseur, a festival isn’t a festival without lager. Camden’s Hells is crisp and, like Neck Oil, dry-hopped for a bitter finish. It matures for a long time in the tank, giving it a depth of flavour – lemony, slightly biscuity – that beats anything you can buy on-site.

If your festival schedule is more goth than glamping, pack a couple of cans of this intense stout from one of Colorado’s hottest breweries. Thick and sweet, and tasting overwhelmingly of coffee and caramel, this beer clocks in at 10.5%. “It will certainly help keep the party going into the small hours,” promises Matt Curtis, beer writer and editor at Total Ales.

Mosaic Pale Ale, brewed by Adnams for Marks & Spencer, £2

Your festival is a washout. One welly has lodged in a sinkhole, the other is filling with water. This is where a generous glass of Adnams’ reassuring single-hop pale ale comes in. Ripe and herbal, it blends mosaic hops’ tropical juice with the Suffolk brewer’s trademark yeast and satisfying maltiness. As it comes in a 500ml can, it’s a good choice for festivals that restrict the number of beers you can bring in. Sit back, enjoy, and pretend you’re sitting by the fire in a warm pub, not sinking deeper into a hungry bog.

Beer at festivals can be a talking point; this is almost guaranteed if you wheel in a case of craft beer and set up a private bar in your gazebo. Impress your friends with a can of this delicious black IPA. Zingy enough to drink in hot weather, it has a rich backbone of toasty dark coffee and chocolate that should see you through a storm.

This light, zippy pils from Bermondsey, London, gets the ultimate seal of approval from beer journalist Adrian Tierney-Jones. “I could drink oodles of it in between playing air guitar,” he reckons. “Years ago, when I went to Glastonbury, my festival ‘beer’ was cider, morning, noon and night. Now, I’d want a crisp, refreshing beer that would complement my alfresco imbibing; nothing too strong and nothing too challenging in the flavour stakes. After all, I’m not just there for the beer.”

What Brewdog has managed to achieve here at just 3.8% ABV is pretty remarkable; this powerfully hoppy pale ale packs tropical fruit, citrus and soft berries. Perhaps too thin for fans of extreme IPAs, it will nevertheless taste like absolute heaven drunk as cool as you can keep it in a field in the sunshine. Or, realistically, slightly warm, in some drizzle (also comes by the can).

This mouthwatering IPA from Yorkshire is the festival beer of choice for Cicerone-certified Natasha Wolf at Weird Beard Brew Co. “I usually go for quaffable and light beers as they are most thirst-quenching,” she explains. “I like great beer to match the great festival vibe, so still take special beers along. It all adds to the experience!”

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